The Horus Heresy: The Master of Mankind

The Emperor walked among the stilled enginery – the sand had blighted everything, even down here – running His gauntleted touch along the fire-blackened metal.

‘Sire? What is happening? Why am I here?’

‘Do you recognise any of this machinery?’

Diocletian let his gaze roam over the cavern’s wreckages. ‘No, my liege.’

The Emperor kept walking, moving from structure to structure the way a man might browse the aisles of librarium. The thunder that shouldn’t be audible this deep in the earth rumbled louder than before.

‘There are those in the Cult Mechanicum, among the Unifiers, that surmise I found the core of the Golden Throne here, beneath the sands of Terra. A relic, they venture, of the Dark Age.’

Diocletian wasn’t sure what to say. He had witnessed uncountable hours of the Golden Throne’s planning and construction processes. Yet, as he said, he recognised nothing here. He didn’t know if that was a flaw in his understanding of the Throne’s genesis among these machines, or simply because this machine crypt had nothing to do with the Emperor’s greatest work at all.

‘Perhaps there was merely inspiration to be found, here,’ the Emperor mused softly. ‘The idea taking form, based not on the successes of an ancient race but the failures of our own.’ He exhaled a rueful sound, not quite a sigh, not quite a chuckle. ‘Did I see these machines, how they fell short of their intended purpose, and resolve to create a far superior incarnation? There is a certain poetry to that, isn’t there, Diocletian? The belief that we know better than those who came before us. That we will suit a throne better than they did.’

‘Sire, I… Are you well?’

‘Or perhaps the idea was mine in its entirety. Any relics of lost ages that have proven useful for their parts being the legacies of dead species that had the same idea, millennia before my birth. In such an instance, each race envisions its own salvation independent of the others, only to discover that other species, other empires, have already failed to save themselves.’

Diocletian breathed slowly in the dark. ‘Does it matter, sire?’

The Emperor turned to him, His eyes focusing on the Custodian for the first time. ‘The war is over, Diocletian. Win or lose, Horus has damned us all. Mankind will share in his ignorance until the last man or woman draws the species’ last breath. The warp will forever be a cancer in the heart of all humans. The Imperium may last a hundred years, or a thousand, or ten thousand. But it will fall, Diocletian. It will fall. The shining path is lost to us. Now we rage against the dying of the light.’

‘It cannot be this way.’ Diocletian stepped forwards, teeth clenched. ‘It cannot.’

The Emperor tilted His head. ‘No? What then do you intend to do, Custodian? How will you – with your spear and your fury and your loyalty – pull fate itself from its repeating path?’

‘We will kill Horus.’ Diocletian stared at his defeated monarch, illuminated in emberish light of the lumoglobe in his hand. ‘And after the war, we can begin anew. We can purge the webway. The Unifiers can rebuild all that was lost, even if it takes centuries. We will strike Horus down and–’

‘I will face the Sixteenth,’ the Emperor interrupted, distracted once more by the machine graveyard. ‘But there will come another to take his place. I see that now. It is the way of things. The enemy will never abate. Another will come, one who will doubtless learn from Horus’ errors of faith and judgement.’

‘Who, my king?’

The Emperor shook His head. ‘There is no way to know. And for now it is meaningless. But remember it well – we are not the only ones learning from this conflict. Our enemies grow wiser, as well.’

Diocletian refused to concede. ‘You are the Emperor of Mankind. We will conquer any who come against us. After the war, we will rebuild under your guidance.’

The Emperor stared at him. He spoke a question that wasn’t a question, one that brooked no answer.

‘And what if I am gone, Diocletian.’

The Custodian had no answer. Thunder pealed above them, shaking the cavern and jarring loose a rattling hail of falling pebble-dust.

‘My king, what now? What comes next?’

The Emperor turned away, walking into the darkness of the cavern while the storm hammered the dead city so far above. He spoke three words that no Custodian had ever heard Him speak before.

‘I don’t know.’

AFTERWORD

The war is over. Humanity has lost. Warhammer 40,000 – in all its Gothic, towering, Cyclopean, decrepit, doomed, rotting Byzantine majesty – has taken its first irrevocable step.